Drupal 7 is lean, clean and much less mean
Drupal is one of our favourite web development platforms. It’s open-source, scalable and deeply customizable, making it the perfect framework for building community-driven, movement-building websites.
Communicopia has actively participated in the Drupal development community for many years. We’ve built lots of websites and contributed code/support to past iterations. It’s been exciting to be part of its evolution from a simple content management system to the robust platform it is today.
Now, after three years of active development, Drupal 7 has officially moved out of beta. The fine folks at Lullabot produced this intro video summing up some of the key changes:
Drupal 7 Marketing Video from Lullabot on Vimeo.
So, what’s new in Drupal 7?
- Endless customization: With views and custom fields, every area of your site can be built the way you and your users want
- Improved image management: Image handling is built directly into the core, making it simpler than ever to add, size and style photos for use in blog posts, photo galleries and more.
- A more intuitive administrative area: Previous versions of Drupal could be pretty daunting to less-than-expert developers. The redesigned administrative area was rigorously tested for usability, making sure it's easy to find the tools you’ll use the most.
- Simplified installation
We’ve used the Drupal 7 beta to run the new version of communicopia.com since last fall. Why? Well, first off: we're keeners. With the huge improvements available in Drupal 7 it made sense to learn and test them out on our own site. Second, by being early adopters, we're making sure our clients will reap the benefits of our Drupal 7 knowledge as soon as possible. Lastly, working with Drupal 7 allowed us to really push the envelope with a bold and different design using the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques. It was an important learning experience that shaped both our understanding of Drupal and our decisions on how to present our company on the web.
All in all, Drupal 7 an excellent step forward for an already exceptional CMS. And, with more than 800 modules already available or in active development, it’s going to be fun testing it out further and seeing the limits of what it can do.